By Raw Fisherfrom Marc Fisher's Blog
Tuesday, April 8, 2008

The bottom line is clear, says Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl: The Catholic Church can no longer afford to run a full complement of inner-city parochial schools serving a population that is, by an overwhelming majority, non-Catholic.

So, facing a deficit of about $50 million over the next five years, the church is moving to convert at least seven D.C. elementary schools into secular, taxpayer-funded charter schools.

"We simply don't have the resources to keep all those schools open," Wuerl said in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors the other day. "We have exhausted the resources available to us."

When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Washington next week for his first visit to the United States as pope, he will deliver the first papal address on Catholic education in this country in more than 20 years. But while the pope's speech is expected to focus on higher education and the degree to which U.S. Catholic colleges now accommodate scholarly views and campus activities that break with church doctrine, the most dramatic changes occurring in Catholic education in the United States are at the elementary and secondary levels, in neighborhood schools that are being shut down after decades and even centuries of service.

In Washington, as in other cities, Catholic dioceses are reacting to financial strains and the movement of church members out to the suburbs by closing elementary schools. Catholic schools in the District have an option not available in many other cities: conversion to charters. But as parochial schools move through the charter approval process, the question is: What will those schools be if they emerge as publicly supported, non-religious institutions? Catholic schools, even when they are educating a population that is 76 percent non-Catholic, as in the archdiocese's D.C. schools, "provide a faith-based formation," Wuerl says. "These schools give kids a self-confidence, a hope."

Take away the religious foundation, and what remains? You'd have "the same teachers, the same kids, the same environment," the archbishop says. "There will still be a level of value formation."

Pressed further, Wuerl concedes that the Catholic schools that could become charters as soon as this fall -- despite the opposition of some parents -- would be very different.

"These schools will not have the same strength as they would as a Catholic school," he says. "When based on a faith conviction, you can accomplish so much more than you can in a system that excludes the relationship with God."

Ironically, the school cutbacks come as the church seeks to lure back lapsed Catholics and deepen the spiritual content of an institution that Wuerl says got away from its roots in recent decades. Catholic schools stand as one of the most important tools available for investing a new generation with a deep attachment to the faith. "They're the heart and soul of the future," Wuerl says.

But the bottom line is the bottom line, and he figures that charters are the best the church can do right now. He asks: "If the alternative is a failing public school, then isn't the charter school the better" choice?

Perhaps so, but any institution that chooses to save money by chipping away at its appeal to the next generation is buying a big box of trouble. In the end, the church is following its members out to the suburbs, naturally focusing its educational work on places where there are more Catholics. Sadly, that entails pulling back on a grand urban tradition of educating inner-city children, regardless of their denomination.